What’s new with Google Cloud

Want to know the latest from Google Cloud? Find it here in one handy location. Check back regularly for our newest updates, announcements, resources, events, learning opportunities, and more.

Week of Feb 22-Feb 26 2021

• Introducing GKE Autopilot–GKE already offers an industry-leading level of automation that makes setting up and operating a Kubernetes cluster easier and more cost effective than do-it-yourself and other managed offerings. Autopilot represents a significant leap forward. In addition to the fully managed control plane that GKE has always provided, using the Autopilot mode of operation automatically applies industry best practices and can eliminate all node management operations, maximizing your cluster efficiency and helping to provide a stronger security posture. Learn more.

• Partnering with Intel to accelerate cloud-native 5G–As we continue to grow cloud-native services for the telecommunications industry, we’re excited to announce a collaboration with Intel to develop reference architectures and integrated solutions for communications service providers to accelerate their deployment of 5G and edge network solutions. Learn more.

• Veeam Backup for Google Cloud now available—Veeam Backup for Google Cloud automates Google-native snapshots to securely protect VMs across projects and regions with ultra-low RPOs and RTOs, and store backups in Google Object Storage to enhance data protection while ensuring lower costs for long-term retention.

• Migrate for Anthos 1.6 GA–With Migrate for Anthos, customers and partners can automatically migrate and modernize traditional application workloads running in VMs into containers running on Anthos or GKE. Included in this new release:

• In-place modernization for Anthos on AWS (Public Preview) to help customers accelerate on-boarding to Anthos AWS while leveraging their existing investment in AWS data sources, projects, VPCs, and IAM controls.

• Additional Docker registries and artifacts repositories support (GA) including AWS ECR, basic-auth docker registries, and AWS S3 storage to provide further flexibility for customers using Anthos Anywhere (on-prem, AWS, etc).

• HTTPS Proxy support (GA) to enable M4A functionality (access to external image repos and other services) where a proxy is used to control external access.

Week of Feb 15-Feb 19 2021

• Introducing Cloud Domains in preview–Cloud Domains simplify domain registration and management within Google Cloud, improve the custom domain experience for developers, increase security, and support stronger integrations around DNS and SSL. Learn more.

• Announcing Databricks on Google Cloud–Our partnership with Databricks enables customers to accelerate Databricks implementations by simplifying their data access, by jointly giving them powerful ways to analyze their data, and by leveraging our combined AI and ML capabilities to impact business outcomes. Learn more.

• Service Directory is GA–As the number and diversity of services grows, it becomes increasingly challenging to maintain an inventory of all of the services across an organization. Last year, we launched Service Directory to help simplify the problem of service management. Today, it’s generally available. Learn more.

Week of Feb 8-Feb 12 2021

• Introducing Bare Metal Solution for SAP workloads–We’ve expanded our Bare Metal Solution–dedicated, single-tenant systems designed specifically to run workloads that are too large or otherwise unsuitable for standard, virtualized environments–to include SAP-certified hardware options, giving SAP customers great options for modernizing their biggest and most challenging workloads. Learn more.

• 9TB SSDs bring ultimate IOPS/$ to Compute Engine VMs–You can now attach 6TB and 9TB Local SSD to second-generation general-purpose N2 Compute Engine VMs, for great IOPS per dollar. Learn more.

• Supporting the Python ecosystem–As part of our longstanding support for the Python ecosystem, we are happy to increase our support for the Python Software Foundation, the non-profit behind the Python programming language, ecosystem and community. Learn more.

• Migrate to regional backend services for Network Load Balancing–We now support backend services with Network Load Balancing–a significant enhancement over the prior approach, target pools, providing a common unified data model for all our load-balancing family members and accelerating the delivery of exciting features on Network Load Balancing. Learn more.

Week of Feb 1-Feb 4 2021

• Apigee launches Apigee X–Apigee celebrates its 10 year anniversary with Apigee X, a new release of the Apigee API management platform. Apigee X harnesses the best of Google technologies to accelerate and globalize your API-powered digital initiatives. Learn more about Apigee X and digital excellence here.
• Celebrating the success of Black founders with Google Cloud during Black History Month–February is Black History Month, a time for us to come together to celebrate and remember the important people and history of the African heritage. Over the next four weeks, we will highlight four Black-led startups and how they use Google Cloud to grow their businesses. Our first feature highlights TQIntelligence and its founder, Yared.

Week of Jan 25-Jan 29 2021

• BeyondCorp Enterprise now generally available–BeyondCorp Enterprise is a zero trust solution, built on Google’s global network, which provides customers with simple and secure access to applications and cloud resources and offers integrated threat and data protection. To learn more, read the blog post, visit our product homepage, and register for our upcoming webinar.

Week of Jan 18-Jan 22 2021

• Cloud Operations Sandbox now available–Cloud Operations Sandbox is an open-source tool that helps you learn SRE practices from Google and apply them on cloud services using Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), with everything you need to get started in one click. You can read our blog post, or get started by visiting cloud-ops-sandbox.dev, exploring the project repo, and following along in the user guide.

• New data security strategy whitepaper–Our new whitepaper shares our best practices for how to deploy a modern and effective data security program in the cloud. Read the blog post or download the paper.

• WebSockets, HTTP/2 and gRPC bidirectional streams come to Cloud Run–With these capabilities, you can deploy new kinds of applications to Cloud Run that were not previously supported, while taking advantage of serverless infrastructure. These features are now available in public preview for all Cloud Run locations. Read the blog post or check out the WebSockets demo app or the sample h2c server app.

• New tutorial: Build a no-code workout app in 5 steps–Looking to crush your new year’s resolutions? Using AppSheet, Google Cloud’s no-code app development platform, you can build a custom fitness app that can do things like record your sets, reps and weights, log your workouts, and show you how you’re progressing. Learn how.

Week of Jan 11-Jan 15 2021

• State of API Economy 2021 Report now available–Google Cloud details the changing role of APIs in 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, informed by a comprehensive study of Apigee API usage behavior across industry, geography, enterprise size, and more. Discover these 2020 trends along with a projection of what to expect from APIs in 2021. Read our blog post here or download and read the report here.
• New in the state of no-code–Google Cloud’s AppSheet looks back at the key no-code application development themes of 2020. AppSheet contends the rising number of citizen developer app creators will ultimately change the state of no-code in 2021. Read more here.

Week of Jan 4-Jan 8 2021

• Last year’s most popular API posts–In an arduous year, thoughtful API design and strategy is critical to empowering developers and companies to use technology for global good. Google Cloud looks back at the must-read API posts in 2020. Read it here.

Week of Dec 21-Dec 25 2020

Week of Dec 14-Dec 18 2020

• Memorystore for Redis enables TLS encryption support (Preview)–With this release, you can now use Memorystore for applications requiring sensitive data to be encrypted between the client and the Memorystore instance. Read more here.
• Monitoring Query Language (MQL) for Cloud Monitoring is now generally available–Monitoring Query language provides developers and operators on IT and development teams powerful metric querying, analysis, charting, and alerting capabilities. This functionality is needed for Monitoring use cases that include troubleshooting outages, root cause analysis, custom SLI / SLO creation, reporting and analytics, complex alert logic, and more. Learn more.

Week of Dec 7-Dec 11 2020

• Memorystore for Redis now supports Redis AUTH–With this release you can now use OSS Redis AUTH feature with Memorystore for Redis instances. Read more here.
• New in serverless computing–Google Cloud API Gateway and its service-first approach to developing serverless APIs helps organizations accelerate innovation by eliminating scalability and security bottlenecks for their APIs. Discover more benefits here.
• Environmental Dynamics, Inc. makes a big move to no-code–The environmental consulting company EDI built and deployed 35+ business apps with no coding skills necessary with Google Cloud’s AppSheet. This no-code effort not only empowered field workers, but also saved employees over 2,550 hours a year. Get the full story here.
• Introducing Google Workspace for Government–Google Workspace for Government is an offering that brings the best of Google Cloud’s collaboration and communication tools to the government with pricing that meets the needs of the public sector. Whether it’s powering social care visits, employment support, or virtual courts, Google Workspace helps governments meet the unique challenges they face as they work to provide better services in an increasingly virtual world. Learn more.

Week of Nov 30-Dec 4 2020

• Google enters agreement to acquire Actifio–Actifio, a leader in backup and disaster recovery (DR), offers customers the opportunity to protect virtual copies of data in their native format, manage these copies throughout their entire lifecycle, and use these copies for scenarios like development and test. This planned acquisition further demonstrates Google Cloud’s commitment to helping enterprises protect workloads on-premises and in the cloud. Learn more.
• Traffic Director can now send traffic to services and gateways hosted outside of Google Cloud–Traffic Director support for Hybrid Connectivity Network Endpoint Groups (NEGs), now generally available, enables services in your VPC network to interoperate more seamlessly with services in other environments. It also enables you to build advanced solutions based on Google Cloud’s portfolio of networking products, such as Cloud Armor protection for your private on-prem services. Learn more.
• Google Cloud launches the Healthcare Interoperability Readiness Program–This program, powered by APIs and Google Cloud’s Apigee, helps patients, doctors, researchers, and healthcare technologists alike by making patient data and healthcare data more accessible and secure. Learn more here.
• Container Threat Detection in Security Command Center–We announced the general availability of Container Threat Detection, a built-in service in Security Command Center. This release includes multiple detection capabilities to help you monitor and secure your container deployments in Google Cloud. Read more here.
• Anthos on bare metal now GA–Anthos on bare metal opens up new possibilities for how you run your workloads, and where. You can run Anthos on your existing virtualized infrastructure, or eliminate the dependency on a hypervisor layer to modernize applications while reducing costs. Learn more.

Week of Nov 23-27 2020

• Tuning control support in Cloud SQL for MySQL–We’ve made all 80 flags that were previously in preview now generally available (GA), empowering you with the controls you need to optimize your databases. See the full list here.
• New in BigQuery ML–We announced the general availability of boosted trees using XGBoost, deep neural networks (DNNs) using TensorFlow, and model export for online prediction. Learn more.
• New AI/ML in retail report–We recently commissioned a survey of global retail executives to better understand which AI/ML use cases across the retail value chain drive the highest value and returns in retail, and what retailers need to keep in mind when going after these opportunities. Learn more or read the report.

Week of Nov 16-20 2020

• New whitepaper on how AI helps the patent industry–Our new paper outlines a methodology to train a BERT (bidirectional encoder representation from transformers) model on over 100 million patent publications from the U.S. and other countries using open-source tooling. Learn more or read the whitepaper.
• Google Cloud support for .NET 5.0–Learn more about our support of .NET 5.0, as well as how to deploy it to Cloud Run.
• .NET Core 3.1 now on Cloud Functions–With this integration you can write cloud functions using your favorite .NET Core 3.1 runtime with our Functions Framework for .NET for an idiomatic developer experience. Learn more.
• Filestore Backups in preview–We announced the availability of the Filestore Backups preview in all regions, making it easier to migrate your business continuity, disaster recovery and backup strategy for your file systems in Google Cloud. Learn more.
• Introducing Voucher, a service to help secure the container supply chain–Developed by the Software Supply Chain Security team at Shopify to work with Google Cloud tools, Voucher evaluates container images created by CI/CD pipelines and signs those images if they meet certain predefined security criteria. Binary Authorization then validates these signatures at deploy time, ensuring that only explicitly authorized code that meets your organizational policy and compliance requirements can be deployed to production. Learn more.
• 10 most watched from Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir–Take a stroll through the 10 sessions that were most popular from Next OnAir, covering everything from data analytics to cloud migration to no-code development. Read the blog.
• Artifact Registry is now GA–With support for container images, Maven, npm packages, and additional formats coming soon, Artifact Registry helps your organization benefit from scale, security, and standardization across your software supply chain. Read the blog.

Week of Nov 9-13 2020

• Introducing the Anthos Developer Sandbox–The Anthos Developer Sandbox gives you an easy way to learn to develop on Anthos at no cost, available to anyone with a Google account. Read the blog.
• Database Migration Service now available in preview–Database Migration Service (DMS) makes migrations to Cloud SQL simple and reliable. DMS supports migrations of self-hosted MySQL databases–either on-premises or in the cloud, as well as managed databases from other clouds–to Cloud SQL for MySQL. Support for PostgreSQL is currently available for limited customers in preview, with SQL Server coming soon. Learn more.
• Troubleshoot deployments or production issues more quickly with new logs tailing–We’ve added support for a new API to tail logs with low latency. Using gcloud, it allows you the convenience of tail -f with the powerful query language and centralized logging solution of Cloud Logging. Learn more about this preview feature.
• Regionalized log storage now available in 5 new regions in preview–You can now select where your logs are stored from one of five regions in addition to global–asia-east1, europe-west1, us-central1, us-east1, and us-west1. When you create a logs bucket, you can set the region in which you want to store your logs data. Get started with this guide.

Week of Nov 2-6 2020

• Cloud SQL adds support for PostgreSQL 13–Shortly after its community GA, Cloud SQL has added support for PostgreSQL 13. You get access to the latest features of PostgreSQL while Cloud SQL handles the heavy operational lifting, so your team can focus on accelerating application delivery. Read more here.
• Apigee creates value for businesses running on SAP–Google Cloud’s API Management platform Apigee is optimized for data insights and data monetization, helping businesses running on SAP innovate faster without fear of SAP-specific challenges to modernization. Read more here.
• Document AI platform is live–The new Document AI (DocAI) platform, a unified console for document processing, is now available in preview. You can quickly access all parsers, tools and solutions (e.g. Lending DocAI, Procurement DocAI) with a unified API, enabling an end-to-end document solution from evaluation to deployment. Read the full story here or check it out in your Google Cloud console.
• Accelerating data migration with Transfer Appliances TA40 and TA300–We’re announcing the general availability of new Transfer Appliances. Customers are looking for fast, secure and easy to use options to migrate their workloads to Google Cloud and we are addressing their needs with next generation Transfer Appliances. Learn more about Transfer Appliances TA40 and TA300.

Week of Oct 26-30 2020

• B.H., Inc. accelerates digital transformation–The Utah based contracting and construction company BHI eliminated IT backlog when non technical employees were empowered to build equipment inspection, productivity, and other custom apps by choosing Google Workspace and the no-code app development platform, AppSheet. Read the full story here.
• Globe Telecom embraces no-code development–Google Cloud’s AppSheet empowers Globe Telecom employees to do more innovating with less code. The global communications company kickstarted their no-code journey by combining the power of AppSheet with a unique adoption strategy. As a result, AppSheet helped Globe Telecom employees build 59 business apps in just 8 weeks. Get the full story.
• Cloud Logging now allows you to control access to logs via Log Views–Building on the control offered via Log Buckets (blog post), you can now configure who has access to logs based on the source project, resource type, or log name, all using standard IAM controls. Logs views, currently in Preview, can help you build a system using the principle of least privilege, limiting sensitive logs to only users who need this information. Learn more about Log Views.
• Document AI is HIPAA compliant—Document AI now enables HIPAA compliance. Now Healthcare and Life Science customers such as health care providers, health plans, and life science organizations can unlock insights by quickly extracting structured data from medical documents while safeguarding individuals’ protected health information (PHI). Learn more about Google Cloud’s nearly 100 products that support HIPAA-compliance.

Week of Oct 19-23 2020

• Improved security and governance in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL–Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now integrates with Cloud IAM (preview) to provide simplified and consistent authentication and authorization. Cloud SQL has also enabled PostgreSQL Audit Extension (preview) for more granular audit logging. Read the blog.
• Announcing the AI in Financial Crime Compliance webinar–Our executive digital forum will feature industry executives, academics, and former regulators who will discuss how AI is transforming financial crime compliance on November 17. Register now.
• Transforming retail with AI/ML–New research provides insights on high value AI/ML use cases for food, drug, mass merchant and speciality retail that can drive significant value and build resilience for your business. Learn what the top use cases are for your sub-segment and read real world success stories. Download the ebook here and view this companion webinar which also features insights from Zulily.
• New release of Migrate for Anthos–We’re introducing two important new capabilities in the 1.5 release of Migrate for Anthos, Google Cloud’s solution to easily migrate and modernize applications currently running on VMs so that they instead run on containers in Google Kubernetes Engine or Anthos. The first is GA support for modernizing IIS apps running on Windows Server VMs. The second is a new utility that helps you identify which VMs in your existing environment are the best targets for modernization to containers. Start migrating or check out the assessment tool documentation (Linux | Windows).
• New Compute Engine autoscaler controls–New scale-in controls in Compute Engine let you limit the VM deletion rate by preventing the autoscaler from reducing a MIG’s size by more VM instances than your workload can tolerate to lose. Read the blog.
• Lending DocAI in preview—Lending DocAI is a specialized solution in our Document AI portfolio for the mortgage industry that processes borrowers’ income and asset documents to speed-up loan applications. Read the blog, or check out the product demo.

Week of Oct 12-16 2020

• New maintenance controls for Cloud SQL–Cloud SQL now offers maintenance deny period controls, which allow you to prevent automatic maintenance from occurring during a 90-day time period. Read the blog.
• Trends in volumetric DDoS attacks–This week we published a deep dive into DDoS threats, detailing the trends we’re seeing and giving you a closer look at how we prepare for multi-terabit attacks so your sites stay up and running. Read the blog.
• New in BigQuery–We shared a number of updates this week, including new SQL capabilities, more granular control over your partitions with time unit partitioning, the general availability of Table ACLs, and BigQuery System Tables Reports, a solution that aims to help you monitor BigQuery flat-rate slot and reservation utilization by leveraging BigQuery’s underlying INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Read the blog.
• Cloud Code makes YAML easy for hundreds of popular Kubernetes CRDs–We announced authoring support for more than 400 popular Kubernetes CRDs out of the box, any existing CRDs in your Kubernetes cluster, and any CRDs you add from your local machine or a URL. Read the blog.
• Google Cloud’s data privacy commitments for the AI era–We’ve outlined how our AI/ML Privacy Commitment reflects our belief that customers should have both the highest level of security and the highest level of control over data stored in the cloud. Read the blog.

• New, lower pricing for Cloud CDN–We’ve reduced the price of cache fill (content fetched from your origin) charges across the board, by up to 80%, along with our recent introduction of a new set of flexible caching capabilities, to make it even easier to use Cloud CDN to optimize the performance of your applications. Read the blog.

• Expanding the BeyondCorp Alliance–Last year, we announced our BeyondCorp Alliance with partners that share our Zero Trust vision. Today, we’re announcing new partners to this alliance. Read the blog.

• New data analytics training opportunities–Throughout October and November, we’re offering a number of no-cost ways to learn data analytics, with trainings for beginners to advanced users. Learn more.

• New BigQuery blog series–BigQuery Explained provides overviews on storage, data ingestion, queries, joins, and more. Read the series.

Week of Oct 5-9 2020

• Introducing the Google Cloud Healthcare Consent Management API–This API gives healthcare application developers and clinical researchers a simple way to manage individuals’ consent of their health data, particularly important given the new and emerging virtual care and research scenarios related to COVID-19. Read the blog.

• Announcing Google Cloud buildpacks–Based on the CNCF buildpacks v3 specification, these buildpacks produce container images that follow best practices and are suitable for running on all of our container platforms: Cloud Run (fully managed), Anthos, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Read the blog.

• Providing open access to the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD)–Our collaboration with Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard provides free access to one of the world’s most comprehensive public genomic datasets. Read the blog.

• Introducing HTTP/gRPC server streaming for Cloud Run–Server-side HTTP streaming for your serverless applications running on Cloud Run (fully managed) is now available. This means your Cloud Run services can serve larger responses or stream partial responses to clients during the span of a single request, enabling quicker server response times for your applications. Read the blog.

• New security and privacy features in Google Workspace–Alongside the announcement of Google Workspace we also shared more information on new security features that help facilitate safe communication and give admins increased visibility and control for their organizations. Read the blog.

• Introducing Google Workspace–Google Workspace includes all of the productivity apps you know and use at home, at work, or in the classroom–Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Chat and more–now more thoughtfully connected. Read the blog.

• New in Cloud Functions: languages, availability, portability, and more–We extended Cloud Functions–our scalable pay-as-you-go Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform that runs your code with zero server management–so you can now use it to build end-to-end solutions for several key use cases. Read the blog.

• Announcing the Google Cloud Public Sector Summit, Dec 8-9–Our upcoming two-day virtual event will offer thought-provoking panels, keynotes, customer stories and more on the future of digital service in the public sector. Register at no cost.